Getting Truth from Media

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Mar 17, 2000

The rubric "You can't believe everything you read in the papers" has been around for ages, with good reason. In fact lately one might think "you can't read anything you read in the papers!

Or see on television. Remember the movie "Network" where it was shone how video footage can be corrupted to cut out the truth when some power elitist needed to have the news fit their agenda?

Does the theme of the New York Times "All the News That's Fit to Print" really mean "All the News That Fits The Agenda"?

On the other hand, when an organ like WorldNetDaily reports a story the mainstream media won't or can't touch, are they merely fitting in their agenda?

With all the "agendas" out there the various media have to conform to, just how does one get at the truth?

Some rules I have come to follow to ferret out propaganda, power elitist or "anti-new-world-order-type" and anything in between:

1. Always wear your "BS" detector

2. Always ask "Who Does This Serve?" If you can follow any money trails, do it.

3. Always look at what the organ advertizes and compare the ads to the stories. Just who is backing this organ and what truth do they want hidden? Local and small-town papers are very good at hiding truth for the sake of financial backers.

4. Look to see if both "left" and "right" are represented. For instance, WorldNetDaily has some obviously left-wing columnists like Maralyn Polak, who is always catching flak from the predominately right-wing readerships. Also, they link frequently to articles in left-wing organs like "Mother Jones" and "The New Republic". An organ must be balanced.

5. If a high government official is out to suppress this organ, you can bet your bottom dollar the organ is trying to expose corruption and get at the truth.

6. If an organ, particularly TV, keeps showing the same pictures and footage over and over again, assume this organ is doing the big lie technique. I'll never forget how CNN kept showing the same Kosovo Albanian refugees, the very same ones, for nearly a week, even after it was discovered that the tens of thousands of "mass graves" of Kosovo Albanians done in by Serbs was a hoax, and that some of the mass graves had Serbs, not Albanians.

7. If a newspaper crops a picture so much that it is obviously hiding the truth of the situation, be suspicious that the newspaper if hiding the truth. For instance: how did Beatlemania get started? Folks were convinced that the Beatles had thousands of London fans screaming for them outside a London show hall, since that is what the caption implied. However, we now know that there were at most only ten fans out there. Folks thought the pix was so cropped that only ten fans were shone out of a couple of thousand, when in fact there really were only ten fans. (And remember the screaming girls at Kennedy Airport? They were paid students of a school in New Jersey.

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